It was the alert doña Taí who advised me of it.
“You ever heard of the Boston Molasses Disaster?”
Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? And if it weren’t, why, having lived in Boston for a year, had I never heard of it? Definitely something to check out.
It seems that on 15 January 1919, a huge vat of molasses exploded in the North End of Boston, creating a 40-foot wave that rushed through the city. Killed 21 people and several horses; 150 people were injured. And it did some serious damage to infrastructure. Take a look below….
Well, in my zeal to alert the international readership of this blog, I checked all this out in Wikipedia. Only to discover that there was a reference to another disaster.
Jump back a century or so, to 1814, in the St. Giles section of London. A vat of beer explodes, and causes other vats to explode in a domino effect. All in all, 323,000 imperial gallons (no idea what that is, but it sounds impressive…) of beer flood the city. St. Giles is an area of poor houses, with many families living in basements. These flood, and the death toll is eight.
Well, it seems that nothing is safe anymore. There are killers in the schools. Molasses can kill. Beer as well, in a way I had never thought.
With all the mayhem afoot, I’m happy to report that a great bunch of kids from Ponce, Puerto Rico, decided to cheer up a food court in their hometown. Here they are, in full swing!
